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I found that Airport Utility 5.6 (for Windows --- haven't tried OS X version) can talk to the newer 802.11ac units. While not "supported", all of the options were there and the thing seemed to work fine.

They did this to me too. I used to have Internet and basic cable, and they would regularly call me to try and get me to add phone service. I ended up having the number that they were calling from go directly to voicemail, but from the logs I can see that they continued to call for quite a while.

That might be the first thing you would do. Thieves often aren't techies. They'll just boot it up and see if they can get it to work, and then pawn it or sell it to someone else.

If you want to be able to track your machine after it is stolen, just make sure it is easy enough for anyone to get to a web browser (easy-to-find guest account with restricted permissions, but can still connect to the local wifi?). Then run some software like Prey. If you have sensitive data, encrypt it but make sure the machine is still bootable.

Just thought I'd throw this out there since I was just testing it today. I have 802.11n gear (Airport Extreme, the 3x3 version with advertised 450 mbps speed). From 50ish feet away through a few walls I get 8 MB - 10 MB per second to my home server. That's getting up near 100 mbps which is good enough for me on wireless, but obviously nowhere near the 450 mbps that Windows claims my link speed to be.

This is of course normal for wireless networking but I'd hope that 802.11ac gear would be able to do a bit better.

Feedly is cloning the Google Reader API and implementing a new back-end as part of their "Normandy" project, so it's likely that other clients will turn to it to keep their apps working (and synchronized). Naturally, the official Google ones will be left out.

Or maybe they can keep the bandwidth the same (or not lower as much as they could) and instead take advantage of higher quality at the same bitrate... so that the channels don't look so terrible with compression artifacts all over the place.

aaron44126 (2631375) writes "Some VLC developers have launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the development of a native port of VLC as a Windows 8 app. The goal is to create an app with a UI that fits into the rest of the Windows 8 ecosystem that supports the playback of all of the types of files that VLC already supports. Playback of optical media (DVD/VCD/BD) is also on the list. They hope to use as much existing code as possible while doing whatever necessary to get VLC running in the "metro" environment and meet Microsoft's requirements for distribution through the Windows Store. Porting to ARM so that it can run on Windows RT devices will happen after the Windows 8 app is complete. The campaign has actually been going on for almost two weeks but they published their first update today, in which they announced their intent to produce a Windows Phone 8 port as well."Link to Original Source

We've all moved to LibreOffice, but I still know a number of people who use or are interested in using OpenOffice, just because that name has been around long enough. If you don't follow sites like this, you might not know that LibreOffice exists. When I mention that they should look at LibreOffice instead, they say "Huh?"

OpenOffice development was somewhat stalled for a while after the LibreOffice fork happened. If development is going to continue, I hope they pick up the improvements from LibreOffice so that everyone can benefit.